Moral Turpitude of Cheating - Essay Example

? Introduction According to David Fellman, moral turpitude is a behavior that is contrary to the society’s standards or the society. Certain companies and organizations conduct psychological testing in order to test the personality of their staff. Minnesota maltiphasic personality inventory is used to test dishonesty disorders of the workers in order to prevent the organizations and institutions from losses caused by dishonesty (Consulting, 2002). Personality disorders are associated with people having fear, low self-esteem and anger. A person changing jobs more frequently is associated with instability of career objective and is likely to cheat. In legal terms, the United States legal system defines moral turpitude to embrace conducts classified as inconsistent with societal predetermined standards of natural justice or morals. Irrespective of whether the morality preservation does not concern legal process, or immoral conducts contribute to illegality, and are thus punishable, the debatable issue remains in determination of what is considered moral or immoral. In the recognition of the definition of moral turpitude, the legal system isolates the word turpitude to include behaviors or conducts that contradicts laws of natural justice, good morals or honesty. On the other hand, the preceding word ‘moral’ is often used to lay emphasis to the meaning and implication of the term rather than contributing to the natural meaning of it. Societal consideration of conducts as qualifying as moral turpitude bears relevance in various legal aspects. At preceding stages, before conviction of a related crime to moral turpitude, a lot of emphasis is placed on the witness’s honesty and thus used as a basis for charging the accused, also used as an accredited basis for revocation or withdrawal of a professional practicing license and bears great significance for societal laws and regulations that concern immigration. In determination of the moral turpitude, there exists a general framework for classification of conducts or crimes as moral turpitude. As such the crimes considered moral turpitude include fraud when obtaining something of value, voluntary manslaughter, murder, prostitute solicitation, sale of illegal drugs consistent failure to file tax returns on annual basis, issuing of bad checks and false accusation and falsely reporting crimes. Davis (2000) also includes being drunk in public, vehicle driving under the influence of alcohol, fighting, simple assault among other minor common societal crimes as not constituting moral turpitude crimes that are punishable by law. (Davis, 2000) Society implies a plural of society that comprises various converging elements of moralities. In such an explanation, other scholars argue that the good existence of a community does not tolerate immoral actions as such which are detrimental to the existence of the community moral structures (Holmes, 2003). Within academic spheres, cheating is gaining prominence in learning institutions with essays and assignments written on behalf of students by commercial service institutions and plagiarism widely associated with student assignments. Consequently, academic instructors and tutors are tirelessly involved in modeling tests and evaluation methodologies in an effort to adjust the degree of passing grades. Some schools have also changed their individual student scores to brighten the performance profile of the school. It is thus evident that comparing the current occurrences in the educational environment with the past educational practices becomes quite difficult to achieve, and as such, the prevalence of cheating in the current educational system is more pronounced than the past regime owing to a variety of self-fulfilling personal convictions and societal educational trends. Within the foregoing discussions, existing literature suggests that many students have participated in cheating in at least one instance during their academic life and others admit that they have cheated all through their academic life until graduation. Moreover, the steady increase in academic cheating is due to inherent desire for success. (Callahan, 2004) Theoretically, learner’s self-perception about their achievement greatly contributes to cheating. Importantly, value theory and self-efficacy theory of motivation insist that cognitive values that affect motivated behaviors accrue from relationship in the interaction between learners and their environment Secondly, strong research alludes to the prevalence of cheating resulting from breakdown in the academic prerequisites of institutions. As such, cheating is often so common in institutions that even educational professors and instructors openly admit its existence. When faced with such circumstances, educational professors and tutors are thus unable to control cheating students or most often treat it as a normal phenomenon. In this respect, most of the students do not relate cheating with moral turpitude. Consistently, students also rationalize cheating as another element of learning. In this respect, most students engage in helping their fellow students through completion of assignments and course projects. Most commonly, students use technology devices to assist their colleagues, as such these students often argue that they learn when they assist and therefore regard cheating as a learning process. The underlying rationalizations in this argument go a long way in mentally convincing students that cheating is morally acceptable. In other studies, Dienstbier and Munter, (1971) argue that there seems to be growing evidence of such values, attitudes and ideas, which most individuals generally referred to as schemas, that view and accept efforts towards propelling students to cheat as moral. In this respect, Dienstbier and his colleague have hypothesized most individuals to the belief that cheating was wrong and thus morally unacceptable, on the other hand, their studies also focused on impact if breaking moral rules and the perceived moral consequence of such. While supporting the results of earlier similar studies, the results of these studies indicated that students often engage in cheating when strong relationship exists between the moral satisfaction of the values, beliefs and ideas that they hold. These values and ideas are what Dienstbier and colleague referred to as ‘schema’. From this study, it can justifiably concluded that cheating is more controlled by internal set of values, ideas and beliefs that one relates to hence it is considered sufficiently morally upright to engage in. (Dienstbier & Munter, 1971) On conceptual basis, cheating regarded as a viable mechanism for the attainment of performance goals. Learners approach learning programs with diverse purposes on the significance of schooling. On a wider basis, students that approach learning programs for the purposes of understanding are often referred to as learning oriented while those that lay emphasis on ability demonstration are often referred to as performance oriented. Within these provisions, other studies suggest that academic dishonesty largely hinder students’ ability to learn resulting from an intrinsic interest or greater urge to learn. Suggested in these studies is a fact that learners’ achievement of their goals is strongly related to cheating in diverse ways: performance related goals reduce the rate of cheating while performance oriented learning goals contribute significantly to cheating process. Besides the foregoing factors on cheating, there exists other arguments that attribute cheating to a variety of factors that fall to the macro analysis. Other moral basis advanced in some research literature attributes cheating to a myriad of macro contextual factors that include family status and background, income status and various issues that generally relate to social issues within the larger societal framework. These issues then form the moral basis for which students opt to engage in cheating for self-fulfilling reasons. To conclude these discussions, it is evident that various strategies employed by students in effect tend to justify the moral turpitude of cheating. It is therefore evident that various societal spheres result from the diverse understanding of the concept of morality and immorality in legal process and society advance cheating. It also emerges that students engage in cheating as a moral justification to excel in academic performance at the expense of the academic process. Most of the individual factors in this context attribute cheating to intrinsic or extrinsic factors where students motivational factors to cheat arise from a complexity of factors that include students academic goals, students ability to excel in the educational process and societal implications for cheating. Moral turpitude for cheating therefore has implications for teaching process and motivational theories of learning. References Callahan, D. (2004). The Cheating Culture: Why more Americans are doing Wrong to get Ahead. Orlando, FL: Hartcourt. Consulting, B. (2002). Burlesson consulting. Retrieved 2012, from Evaluating honesty of IT: www.dba-oracle.com Davis, R. (2000). Handbook of Criminal Evidence. edition Dienstbier, R., & Munter, P. (1971). Cheating as a function of the labelling natural arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 , 208-13. Holmes, H. J. (2003, 24 November). Should we presume moral Turpitude to our children. Retrieved 2012, from Medical Ethics: www.jmb.bmj.com Read More